Data compression is the compacting of information by lowering the number of bits which are stored or transmitted. This way, the compressed information will take less disk space than the original one, so a lot more content can be stored on identical amount of space. There're many different compression algorithms that work in different ways and with a number of them just the redundant bits are deleted, so once the data is uncompressed, there is no loss of quality. Others delete excessive bits, but uncompressing the data afterwards will result in lower quality in comparison with the original. Compressing and uncompressing content takes a huge amount of system resources, particularly CPU processing time, so each and every hosting platform which uses compression in real time needs to have sufficient power to support that feature. An example how info can be compressed is to replace a binary code such as 111111 with 6x1 i.e. "remembering" what number of sequential 1s or 0s there should be instead of storing the whole code.

Data Compression in Cloud Hosting

The compression algorithm employed by the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud internet hosting platform is named LZ4. It can upgrade the performance of any Internet site hosted in a cloud hosting account with us because not only does it compress data significantly better than algorithms employed by various other file systems, but it also uncompresses data at speeds which are higher than the hard disk reading speeds. This is achieved by using a lot of CPU processing time, that is not a problem for our platform because it uses clusters of powerful servers working together. One more advantage of LZ4 is that it enables us to create backup copies more quickly and on less disk space, so we can have multiple daily backups of your files and databases and their generation won't change the performance of the servers. That way, we can always restore all content that you may have deleted by mistake.

Data Compression in Semi-dedicated Servers

The semi-dedicated server plans which we offer are created on a powerful cloud hosting platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS employs a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that is greater than any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed because LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and because of this, sites running on a platform where LZ4 is enabled will work quicker. We are able to take full advantage of this feature regardless of the fact that it requires quite a lot of CPU processing time as our platform uses a lot of powerful servers working together and we do not create accounts on just a single machine like many companies do. There's one more advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data very well and does that very quickly, we can also generate multiple daily backup copies of all accounts without influencing the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. This way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.